Thursday, April 22, 2010

I found this old Springsteen poster at a home I was visiting and just had to take a picture of it. From what I can tell, it's from 1975 and what I love about it is that it looks like it was used to line some cat's litter box before it was framed. The wrinkles and tears really give the poster character. Last summer I found a great Frank Zappa poster that was in even worse shape!

In case you're a Springsteen memorabilia fan, I found this site that gives you what seems to be quite a complete Springsteen history with images of posters and tickets.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Recently, I was in Texas and New Mexico for a 5 day vacation. Just before I left I got a call from a senior manager at Scholastic who asked me if I would do some sketches for an internal presentation. They liked the quality of the sketches I had done for previous jobs (which I then went on to finish and color) and requested that these be done as sketches. Great! I knew I could fit in some work while I was away; what I didn't realize was just how many sketches there would be! It turned out that there were 4 pages of progressions (which they had sketched out very basically with stick figures) which illustrated how a certain segment offers important benefits to Scholastic.

So I started out with simple sketches with a ballpoint pen in my sketchbook (usually in the hotel room while my son napped) like this:

Which I then redrew with a nicer drawing pen:

When I returned to Boston I arranged the separate illustrations on the page and added halftones:

Another page:

A detail from the page above:

I was very happy with how they turned out.

Just before I got on the plane to Texas, I was asked if I could work on a sketched-out logo (same style) for their segment as well. The concept was Entrepreneurial ideas/Innovation and to include the words and phrases you see below. My client's wish was to avoid using the lightbulb cliche as a symbol of innovation, so I created a futuristic-looking device that is (pardon the pun) light years ahead of the bulb.

Well, I can't even tell you how much I enjoyed creating these illustrations and logo. The fun of my job is finding creative ways to express ideas and I got to do just that! And Scholastic was very happy with the work. I even got to draw an Ed version of Clifford for one of the pages!